Optical communication interfaces have been implemented with optics (e.g., lasers, photodiodes, etc) soldered or affixed in some manner onto the main printed circuit board (PCB). Over recent years, pluggable optical transceivers have become popular, in which small form pluggable (SFP) optical modules have been integrated with the PCB. The SFP optical modules convert electrical signals transmitted by the physical layer (PHY) of the chip, or application specific integrated circuits (ASICs) with embedded PHY technology, to the SFP module into optical signals that are modulated by the SFP module (based upon the electrical signals provided by the chip) and transported over fiber optic cables. However, SFP optical modules must be highly specialized to be capable of modulating optical signals based upon the data rates required for a particular ASIC architecture.
New silicon based modulators in emerging technologies enable the modulation and detection of light in silicon integrated circuits (ICs) which are compatible with traditional complementary metal oxide semiconductor (CMOS) processing. These silicon based modulators provide an opportunity to desist using highly specialized SFP optical modules which must be optimized to modulate for a particular data rate by pursuing a new architecture which uses the CMOS IC on-board as an optical modulator and detector. In such systems, the laser or light source can be co-packaged or integrated with the PHY chip in the PCB. However, given the reliability and failure rate of lasers and optics systems, the integration of the light source into the PHY chip can lead to costly replacements within the silicon photonics based system if the light source fails. In addition, the packaging of the light source within the PHY chip can also be expensive.